Video transcript

(lively music) Steven: When we think of 19th Century landscape painting, we so often think of an artist painting plein air, that is, painting outside, before the landscape, but that wasn't always the case. In the work of Caspar David Friedrich, his paintings were studio paintings. They were inventions, to
a very great extentent, and that's certainly the
case of The Lone Tree. Beth: Right. He did studies outside, in pencil, and then would compose a
painting in his studio. Steven: It makes sense that these would be studio works because
Friedrich was using landscape to portray deeper ideas, deeper meanings. Beth: This symbolic landscape
includes a lone tree. Steven: And what a tree it
is: gnarled, anthropomorphic. Beth: It's brooming towards
its bottom, and we can see a shepherd underneath
it, gazing at his flock. As it rises up, it seems to struggle, as though its top has been blasted off by lightning or a terrible
storm, and it's struggling to just eck out a few
leaves towards its top. Steven: It stands like a lone sentinel. It is ancient. Friedrich is creating
this contrast between the ephemeral state of that shepherd, that one man's life, what, 70-80 years, as opposed to the thousand-year-old tree that had stood here
through wars and storms. Beth: We're certainly meant to look at the top of that tree,
the utmost beam part, where Friedrich has parted the mountains and given us an expanse of blue sky. That's the place where
Friedrich directs our gaze. Steven: Is it me, or am I
seeing a kind of cruciform? Organic, but nevertheless,
a reference to the cross. Beth: I think that's very likely there. And we see a church
rising above a small town. Steven: But that church
is tiny compared to the cathedral that is this tree. Beth: That is, nature. Steven: Friedrich is pointing us to a kind of older spirituality. It's so interesting, when
we think about traditional or [classisized] landscapes,
say from the Baroque, we might think of the
work of Claude Lorrain, who had so carefully
constructed a kind of system or formula for the
representation of landscape in which trees function
as a kind of curtain that is pulled aside to draw us into a deeper landscape, that
is, trees frame the image, they frame the deep lanscape. Friedrich has done the reverse here. He's made the tree the main protagonist. The open spaces function
as the frame for the tree. It is this move away from classisizing, although I do want to
note that the idea of the shepherd and the sheep is very much a classical element that
we might find in a Claude. Beth: But it's also a Christian element, a shepherd and his flock. Steven: Finding shelter
under that ancient tree. But, even given that
cruciform, there's a sense that maybe this tree is even older, that it has a primordial spirituality. Perhaps it had witnessed
the Druidic traditions. This tree is the link back to a past that is awe-inspiring in its
ability to resist the forces of nature, the forces of
man, the march of time. (lively music)